Thistles can ruin the whole party

Yesterday it was the rocky road; today it’s those thistles. Growing a crop is not an easy task. Based on the ratio laid out in the parable, only 1 seed in 4 managed to produce what the farmer intended. But today we are going to see what we can learn from the experience of the 3rd seed, the one that landed among the thistles, which soon chocked the life out of it. Here’s the text:
          “The seed sown among thistles stands for people who hear the message, but              the worries about this life and the deceitful nature of wealth strangle it so it               yields nothing” (Mark 4:19).
 
       You may have observed in reading this parable that in the first unit the “seed” is Jesus’ teaching., but it's people in the other three. What I take from this is certain caution about making the interpretation too precise. It leaves a bit more room for imaginative understanding (a boon for a good speaker). In any case the seed in this case represents people who hear the message and come to life, but the thistles grow a lot faster and strangle the plant so that it yields nothing. The strong opportunity for application to life lies in the nature of thistle – what is it that keeps the plant from becoming what it was intended to be?  And now the preacher warms up as he begins to describe what happens to his parishioners if they choose to live too close to the thistles of contemporary culture.
       The two things mentioned that will strangle new spiritual life are worries about this life and the deceitful nature of wealth. The coupling of theses two, worry and wealth, suggests undue concern to get ahead materially. First you worry whether you will gain wealth and then when you get it you worry about losing it. It is a sly method of the adversary to begin with a natural desire for financial stability and then become so enamored with the entire lifelong process that concern about maintaining what one has achieved takes charge of that wonderful period of life when the battle has supposedly been won and you can enjoy the spoils of having the ability to maintain a proper balance between what is and what could be.
       Worry, for the believer is the failure to believe that God knows what he is doing and needs your nervous help right now. It is what you might call “practical atheism.” And the deceitfulness of riches, not the riches themselves, keeps telling you that if you could only have that (the thing over there) your deeper need would be met. In other words, God is essentially equivalent to something you can purchase, a house, a new car, beach property in Southern California. The assumption is that they will both meet that sense of emptiness that hovers over the heart. Worry and desire, they will choke new life; that’s what the parable is teaching.